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Mon, Sep. 17th, 2007, 01:16 pm Curiouser and curiouser

So, I suddenly noticed that Flume had some more features. "Fair enough", I thought, "it's presumably in heavy development". But then I logged in to my other account (the first one I got) and the features had vanished. So I logged back into my second account (the one I achieved through my 733t haxx0ring and, err, changing on a field in the XML) again and the features were back.

A quick delve later and I believe now that it's to do with the 'sassiness' (their word, not mine) rating of my 'Fountain' (grind teeth at name). At first I thought that might be to do with how many friends I had or something but that appears not to be the case. It appears to be more to do with a combination of who invited you and how 'sassy' your blog (a mandatory field in the signup process) is - presumably obtained through Alexa or Digg or Technorati or something.

Since I, err, obtained my second invite by guessing the user name of a A-list blogger my second account was deemed 'sassier' (that's actually giving me a headache now) than my first and I get correspondingly more features.

I've asked around, and actually I suspect the 'sassiness' rating is only initially weighted by the person who invited you. After you've used your first invite it switches to being weighted towards those you invite.

I'm guessing this is to prevent the kind of promiscuous "friending" that you see on sites like myspace: too many flumers without sass and you start losing features.

After some more playing around I concur. I'm not sure whether is a physical manifestation of the blogging caste system writ large and grotesque or will turn out to be some sort of genius combination of Slashdot style karma and anti-Myspace whoring system.

Or both.

Although it also wouldn't surprise me if what I was listening to started affecting my sassiness. Like you have to be listening to the obscure band that the cool kids are listening too but have to stop when it gets too popular. Maybe get more sass points if you're the first person to listen to something and then everyone else does after.

Erk - apparently the sassiness changes are cumilative. When your sass increases, the sass of your inviter increases, and to a lesser extent those in your network. And the same goes for decreases.

I added a sockpuppet account with a fresh, unused, blog to test the theory. My sass dropped down, but not for over an hour (are new users being checked by hand?). I then got a rather pissy message (tellingly, via ye olde email rather than flumail) from the guy who invited me on, accusing me of "messing with his sass".

Apparently one of the features I can't currently access is a little graph of the sass for all the people your network. My adding a fake account apparently caused a visible drop in sassiness across his entire social group! Interesting way of incorporating peer-pressure into what is essentially an (artificially limited) resource management game.

Regarding the music thing, that sounds promising. Do you think that'll only work for the built in streamer, or the iTunes-plugin stuff? If I could set up a playlist and have it grind overnight that might help fix things. Otherwise I'm probably going to delete the account and try for a fresh invite through someone else.